


Ruthless

by WordObsessed



Category: Wayward Children Series - Seanan McGuire
Genre: The Moors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-09
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:14:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26887195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WordObsessed/pseuds/WordObsessed
Summary: The Moors were not kind, but to them, they were not cruel. And what you have to understand is that Jillian Wolcott was perfectly happy being her Master's daughter
Relationships: Jack Wolcott & Jill Wolcott
Comments: 1
Kudos: 8





	1. Jack and Jill live up the hill

**Author's Note:**

> Why yes, the chapter titles are the same as the part title in Down Among the Sticks and Bones, that's exactly where I stole the inspiration from

A windmill of epic proportions that existed solely on the rules of science and lightning. A castle that didn't care about the laws of nature, only the wants of its Master and his daughter. Each holding their equal opposite, each completely at home. Their parents wouldn't have recognized them. They both took comfort in that fact. The Moors were not kind, but to them, they were not cruel.

What you have to understand is that Jillian Wolcott was perfectly happy being her Master's daughter. She was only required to do what her Master asked her to. When she did this, it made him happy. But most importantly, it made her happy to make him happy. She lived to serve, and she was perfectly content to spend her life that way. She gave her obedience, and he gave her safety and endless comfort.

She couldn't imagine being her sister, forced to be of service to that terrible Doctor Bleak, working hard for... what? Jack called them "wonders of science." The only wonder Jill saw was in the color of her blood, and the way the Master loved her, like she was the only one that had ever mattered. There was a wonder in the stopped heart, and the fear in people's eyes when they heard her name and finally understood that she was important.

There was something mesmerizing about brushing her hair in the morning. She had trained it into being silky and cascading down her shoulders, perfect to twirl around her fingers. The Master liked her hair, it shadowed her throat from all the others, who didn't deserve to see the curve of her skin, decorated with white scars. So she would brush it, a hundred times, like Mary had told her, and even someone before that.

She would sometimes remember who she was when she had arrived at the castle, with her short hair and independent soul that she had been forced into developing. She did not want to be left on her own and expected to survive. She wanted to be helped, for someone to tilt her chin up and tell her she was beautiful and wanted.

She wanted to be ruthless. When people were scared of you, they respected you, and they remembered you. Better to be remembered as cruel than forgotten as mediocre. It was so much easier to be ruthless, and so much more satisfying in every short-term.

Jill would walk the battlements of the castle, surveying what was soon to be her land, and her people, and catch glimpses of the far off windmill. She had always wanted to be a queen, and she was one very long and very short year from achieving all of it. But it itched under her skin. The closer all her dreams came to being true, the more scared she was of it all being taken away.

She counted the days. She refused to leave the castle. Mary would, with only a moment's hesitation, open all of the doors Jill was about to walk through and check to make sure they led where they were supposed to.

Jill would sometimes talk to the Moon, telling it all her plans, and how perfect she was for this world. She told herself she was just reminding the great blood-red goddess that she had been picked for this world. She told herself she was not begging to be allowed to be happy here.


	2. Jill and Jack into the black

When Jaqueline Wolcott, apprentice to Doctor Bleak, and Jillian Wolcott, the Master's murderous daughter, left the Moors, something changed.

They had been the dawn of a new era of the balance. The Moon had brought them specifically for that purpose, and had watched over them for five years. But then one of them had broken the rules. Even though the Moors was High Wicked by any interpretation, it was also High Logic, and breaking the rules meant punishment.

So the villagers had gathered their torches to make her pay for the death of one of their own, only to find that the Moon had already quite taken care of it for them.

Alexis Chopper was revived for a second time, and even though her terrifying girlfriend had been shoved back through a door, she lingered around the windmill. There were whispers that she would take Jack's place, become the official apprentice. No one that really knew Alexis believed them. She was too kind hearted, and too used to the world to truly understand just how miraculous the lightning and its wonders were.

Just as Doctor Bleak had promised, the villagers' attentions were soon diverted, this time by a small explosion of fights between the werewolves. They doubled the guard on the gates, and seemed content to mostly forget about the two foundlings that had briefly terrorized and walked among them, just as they had forgotten all the ones that came before them but didn't stay.

The Master was, for the most part, brooding in his castle, making far less rampages of the village to demand respect and payment. He never came personally to the Chopper residence, but demanded a double in their payments for a year. The family complied.

The Moon waxed and waned and watched, and the Moors moved on, unaware of the two girls trapped on the other side of a door.

Mary tidied Jill's room, but left it untouched, preserved as if for display, for the next foundling she would try to save.

Alexis closed the door of the room of the windmill that was Jack's, and ticked off every day that passed. Doctor Bleak had told her what he had told his apprentice, and she knew her Jack. She would find a way, even if the blood she got for the door had to be her own. Alexis just prayed to the Moon that the endeavor wouldn't hurt her. She and Doctor Bleak could revive a dead Jack. The lightning couldn't do much against a changed heart.

But one year from the day Jill stabbed Alexis to a second death, Jack appears from the outline of a door in a crack of lightning. She is holding the dead body of her sister and a bloody pair of scissors, and she tells Doctor Bleak she regrets nothing.


	3. Jack and Jill with time to kill

When Jill came to the Moors for the second time, it was under a layer of shame. Then her Master had come to claim her, and she could breathe for the first time since coming home.

If she had come back, and the Master had not wanted her, she didn't know what she would have done. To be so completely unwanted by either the world of her birth or the one that had chosen her, or by her father or her sister... she didn't want to consider that.

But he had wanted her. He had wanted her as his child, even if he wouldn't take her blood and Mary seemed less respectful than she had been a year before, now that she thought Jill couldn't be her master.

She consented to the switching of bodies the moment the Master told her about the possibility. She would do anything to take back the destiny that had been stolen from her. When she considered the amount of blood already on her hands, what was one more?

When she walked the long road to the windmill, dressed as a bride ready to lose everything, she prayed to the Moon. She told it she had returned, and was going to keep her promise this time. She would stay, and she would be ruthless.

Her heart beat hard in her new chest when Jack and Alexis disappeared through the door. This body knew its twin, and it occurred to her that this was the first time they had been in separate worlds.

Well. It was only fitting. Jack had tried to take this world from her, so Jill would take it back and bar Jack from entry.

She was obedient when the Master told her they had to wait for the next full Moon to perform the ritual that would make her his daughter in truth.

She spent the time brushing her hair- so much coarser than the hair she used to have- and examining the skin of her throat that looked so odd in its perfection. Like a marble statue, waiting to be marked.

She heard that her sister had returned. She heard that she did not return alone, nor just with Alexis. She returned with the teenage equivalent of an army.

Jill listened as they travelled to the Drowned Gods, and she understood. The Moon had made her declaration. She went to her Master, and she told him she loved him. She asked if they could perform the ritual now. He refused. It was all because of tradition, and the rules of the Moon.

Jill understood, but this did not mean she was going down without a fight. So when she met Jack for the last time, on the battlements of her castle, she knew she was going to die, but she was going to die as she had wanted to live immortally. She was under the bloody glow of her Moon, with her father at her side, and she was ruthless.

It was easy, to be a monster. It was easy to be hated. It was even easier to fall to one's death.


	4. Jill and Jack will not come back

From that moment on, Jack and Jill, Jill and Jack, did not exist. Jack gathered up the body of her sister and brought it back to the windmill. After resurrecting Doctor Bleak, she burned the body and offered the smoke and ashes as payment to the Moon.

Jack was content to be on her own, and she was equally content to stay with her family, of her father and her betrothed. She knew with absolute certainty that no being or thing could ever take this away from her, because she was bound to the Moors just as Jill would have been if she had been turned.

She was happy. She dealt with every problem of the Moors, from attacks from the things that roamed the night to a siren that sang too loudly and nearly took one of the villagers. The Moon was not pleased with that particular almost-transaction.

This was her home, and she had made it so. She hoped the people she had known from her birth world would find their homes as well, and for those who couldn't, that they could find their happiness somewhere.

The lightning ran through her heart, and she thanked the Moon every night for the decisions it had made. Did she wonder if it had picked the right sister? Did she wonder if her choices, made in a panic as they were, were the correct ones? Of course. But if she was to be the scientist of the Moors, the past could not define her future, only guide it.


End file.
